Anna Leath, three days later, sat in Miss Painter's drawing-
room in the rue de Matignon.

Coming up precipitately that morning from the country, she
had reached Paris at one o'clock and Miss Painter's landing
some ten minutes later. Miss Painter's mouldy little man-
servant, dissembling a napkin under his arm, had mildly
attempted to oppose her entrance; but Anna, insisting, had
gone straight to the dining-room and surprised her friend--
who ate as furtively as certain animals--over a strange meal
of cold mutton and lemonade. Ignoring the embarrassment she
caused, she had set forth the object of her journey, and
Miss Painter, always hatted and booted for action, had
immediately hastened out, leaving her to the solitude of the
bare fireless drawing-room with its eternal slip-covers and
"bowed" shutters.

In this inhospitable obscurity Anna had sat alone for close
upon two hours. Both obscurity and solitude were acceptable
to her, and impatient as she was to hear the result of the
errand on which she had despatched her hostess, she desired
still more to be alone. During her long meditation in a
white-swathed chair before the muffled hearth she had been
able for the first time to clear a way through the darkness
and confusion of her thoughts. The way did not go far, and
her attempt to trace it was as weak and spasmodic as a
convalescent's first efforts to pick up the thread of
living. She seemed to herself like some one struggling to
rise from a long sickness of which it would have been so
much easier to die. At Givre she had fallen into a kind of